Structured Electronic Health Record (EHR) data stores patient information in relational tables and plays a central role in clinical decision-making. Recent advances have explored the use of large language models (LLMs) to process such data, showing promise across various clinical tasks. However, the absence of standardized evaluation frameworks and clearly defined tasks makes it difficult to systematically assess and compare LLM performance on structured EHR data. To address these evaluation challenges, we introduce EHRStruct, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs on structured EHR tasks. EHRStruct defines 11 representative tasks spanning diverse clinical needs and includes 2,200 task-specific evaluation samples derived from two widely used EHR datasets. We use EHRStruct to evaluate 20 advanced and representative LLMs, covering both general and medical models. We further analyze key factors influencing model performance, including input formats, few-shot generalisation, and finetuning strategies, and compare results with 11 state-of-the-art LLM-based enhancement methods for structured data reasoning. Our results indicate that many structured EHR tasks place high demands on the understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. In response, we propose EHRMaster, a code-augmented method that achieves state-of-the-art performance and offers practical insights to guide future research.

Simulating human profiles by instilling personas into large language models (LLMs) is rapidly transforming research in agentic behavioral simulation, LLM personalization, and human-AI alignment. However, most existing synthetic personas remain shallow and simplistic, capturing minimal attributes and failing to reflect the rich complexity and diversity of real human identities. We introduce DEEPPERSONA, a scalable generative engine for synthesizing narrative-complete synthetic personas through a two-stage, taxonomy-guided method. First, we algorithmically construct the largest-ever human-attribute taxonomy, comprising over hundreds of hierarchically organized attributes, by mining thousands of real user-ChatGPT conversations. Second, we progressively sample attributes from this taxonomy, conditionally generating coherent and realistic personas that average hundreds of structured attributes and roughly 1 MB of narrative text, two orders of magnitude deeper than prior works. Intrinsic evaluations confirm significant improvements in attribute diversity (32 percent higher coverage) and profile uniqueness (44 percent greater) compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Extrinsically, our personas enhance GPT-4.1-mini's personalized question answering accuracy by 11.6 percent on average across ten metrics and substantially narrow (by 31.7 percent) the gap between simulated LLM citizens and authentic human responses in social surveys. Our generated national citizens reduced the performance gap on the Big Five personality test by 17 percent relative to LLM-simulated citizens. DEEPPERSONA thus provides a rigorous, scalable, and privacy-free platform for high-fidelity human simulation and personalized AI research.

Region representation learning plays a pivotal role in urban computing by extracting meaningful features from unlabeled urban data. Analogous to how perceived facial age reflects an individual's health, the visual appearance of a city serves as its "portrait", encapsulating latent socio-economic and environmental characteristics. Recent studies have explored leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to incorporate textual knowledge into imagery-based urban region representation learning. However, two major challenges remain: i) difficulty in aligning fine-grained visual features with long captions, and ii) suboptimal knowledge incorporation due to noise in LLM-generated captions. To address these issues, we propose a novel pre-training framework called UrbanLN that improves Urban region representation learning through Long-text awareness and Noise suppression. Specifically, we introduce an information-preserved stretching interpolation strategy that aligns long captions with fine-grained visual semantics in complex urban scenes. To effectively mine knowledge from LLM-generated captions and filter out noise, we propose a dual-level optimization strategy. At the data level, a multi-model collaboration pipeline automatically generates diverse and reliable captions without human intervention. At the model level, we employ a momentum-based self-distillation mechanism to generate stable pseudo-targets, facilitating robust cross-modal learning under noisy conditions. Extensive experiments across four real-world cities and various downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our UrbanLN.

We introduce the STATION, an open-world multi-agent environment for autonomous scientific discovery. The Station simulates a complete scientific ecosystem, where agents can engage in long scientific journeys that include reading papers from peers, formulating hypotheses, collaborating with peers, submitting experiments, and publishing results. Importantly, there is no centralized system coordinating their activities. Utilizing their long context, agents are free to choose their own actions and develop their own narratives within the Station. Experiments demonstrate that AI agents in the Station achieve new state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of benchmarks, spanning mathematics, computational biology, and machine learning, notably surpassing AlphaEvolve in circle packing. A rich tapestry of unscripted narratives emerges, such as agents collaborating and analyzing other works rather than pursuing myopic optimization. From these emergent narratives, novel methods arise organically, such as a new density-adaptive algorithm for scRNA-seq batch integration that borrows concepts from another domain. The Station marks a first step towards autonomous scientific discovery driven by emergent behavior in an open-world environment, representing a new paradigm that moves beyond rigid pipelines.

Modern IoT deployments for environmental sensing produce high volume spatiotemporal data to support downstream tasks such as forecasting, typically powered by machine learning models. While existing filtering and strategic deployment techniques optimize collected data volume at the edge, they overlook how variations in sampling frequencies and spatial coverage affect downstream model performance. In many forecasting models, incorporating data from additional sensors denoise predictions by providing broader spatial contexts. This interplay between sampling frequency, spatial coverage and different forecasting model architectures remain underexplored. This work presents a systematic study of forecasting models - classical models (VAR), neural networks (GRU, Transformer), spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs), and time series foundation models (TSFMs: Chronos Moirai, TimesFM) under varying spatial sensor nodes density and sampling intervals using real-world temperature data in a wireless sensor network. Our results show that STGNNs are effective when sensor deployments are sparse and sampling rate is moderate, leveraging spatial correlations via encoded graph structure to compensate for limited coverage. In contrast, TSFMs perform competitively at high frequencies but degrade when spatial coverage from neighboring sensors is reduced. Crucially, the multivariate TSFM Moirai outperforms all models by natively learning cross-sensor dependencies. These findings offer actionable insights for building efficient forecasting pipelines in spatio-temporal systems. All code for model configurations, training, dataset, and logs are open-sourced for reproducibility: https://github.com/UIUC-MONET-Projects/Benchmarking-Spatiotemporal-Forecast-Models

A common approach to mechanistic interpretability is to causally manipulate model representations via targeted interventions in order to understand what those representations encode. Here we ask whether such interventions create out-of-distribution (divergent) representations, and whether this raises concerns about how faithful their resulting explanations are to the target model in its natural state. First, we demonstrate theoretically and empirically that common causal intervention techniques often do shift internal representations away from the natural distribution of the target model. Then, we provide a theoretical analysis of two cases of such divergences: "harmless" divergences that occur in the behavioral null-space of the layer(s) of interest, and "pernicious" divergences that activate hidden network pathways and cause dormant behavioral changes. Finally, in an effort to mitigate the pernicious cases, we apply and modify the Counterfactual Latent (CL) loss from Grant (2025) allowing representations from causal interventions to remain closer to the natural distribution, reducing the likelihood of harmful divergences while preserving the interpretive power of the interventions. Together, these results highlight a path towards more reliable interpretability methods.

Test-time reasoning architectures such as those following the Generate-Verify paradigm, where a model iteratively refines or verifies its own generated outputs, prioritise generation and verification but exclude the monitoring processes that determine when and how reasoning should begin. This omission may contribute to the prefix dominance trap, in which models commit early to suboptimal reasoning paths and seldom recover, yielding roughly 20% accuracy loss. We address this architectural gap by proposing the Monitor-Generate-Verify (MGV) framework, a computational translation of Flavell's and Nelson and Narens' metacognitive theories that preserves their psychological detail. MGV extends the Generate-Verify paradigm by adding explicit monitoring that captures metacognitive experiences (from difficulty assessments to confidence judgements) before generation begins and refines future monitoring through verification feedback. Though we present no empirical validation, MGV provides a vocabulary for diagnosing component-level failures in reasoning systems, suggests specific architectural interventions for future designs, and identifies connections to resource-rational analysis that may ground its mechanisms in normative principles.

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in automated negotiation has set a high performance benchmark, but their computational cost and data privacy requirements render them unsuitable for many privacy-sensitive, on-device applications such as mobile assistants, embodied AI agents or private client interactions. While small language models (SLMs) offer a practical alternative, they suffer from a significant performance gap compared to LLMs in playing emotionally charged complex personas, especially for credit negotiation. This paper introduces EQ-Negotiator, a novel framework that bridges this capability gap using emotional personas. Its core is a reasoning system that integrates game theory with a Hidden Markov Model(HMM) to learn and track debtor emotional states online, without pre-training. This allows EQ-Negotiator to equip SLMs with the strategic intelligence to counter manipulation while de-escalating conflict and upholding ethical standards. Through extensive agent-to-agent simulations across diverse credit negotiation scenarios, including adversarial debtor strategies like cheating, threatening, and playing the victim, we show that a 7B parameter language model with EQ-Negotiator achieves better debt recovery and negotiation efficiency than baseline LLMs more than 10 times its size. This work advances persona modeling from descriptive character profiles to dynamic emotional architectures that operate within privacy constraints. Besides, this paper establishes that strategic emotional intelligence, not raw model scale, is the critical factor for success in automated negotiation, paving the way for effective, ethical, and privacy-preserving AI negotiators that can operate on the edge.

Agentic AI frameworks add a decision-making orchestrator embedded with external tools, including web search, Python interpreter, contextual database, and others, on top of monolithic LLMs, turning them from passive text oracles into autonomous problem-solvers that can plan, call tools, remember past steps, and adapt on the fly. This paper aims to characterize and understand the system bottlenecks introduced by agentic AI workloads from a largely overlooked CPU-centric perspective. We first systematically characterize Agentic AI on the basis of orchestrator/decision making component, inference path dynamics and repetitiveness of the agentic flow which directly influences the system-level performance. Thereafter, based on the characterization, we choose five representative agentic AI workloads- Haystack RAG, Toolformer, ChemCrow, Langchain and SWE-Agent to profile latency, throughput and energy metrics and demystify the significant impact of CPUs on these metrics relative to GPUs. We observe that - 1. Tool processing on CPUs can take up to 90.6% of the total latency; 2. Agentic throughput gets bottlenecked either by CPU factors - coherence, synchronization and over-subscription of cores or GPU factors - main memory capacity and bandwidth; \circled{3} CPU dynamic energy consumes up to 44% of the total dynamic energy at large batch sizes. Based on the profiling insights, we present two key optimizations- 1. CPU and GPU-Aware Micro-batching (CGAM) and 2. Mixed Agentic Workload Scheduling (MAWS) for homogeneous and heterogeneous agentic workloads respectively to demonstrate the potential to improve the performance, efficiency, and scalability of agentic AI. We achieve up to 2.1x and 1.41x P50 latency speedup compared to the multi-processing benchmark for homogeneous and heterogeneous agentic workloads respectively.

Generating automated reports for 3D positron emission tomography (PET) is an important and challenging task in medical imaging. PET plays a vital role in oncology, but automating report generation is difficult due to the complexity of whole-body 3D volumes, the wide range of potential clinical findings, and the limited availability of annotated datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce PETARSeg-11K, the first large-scale, publicly available dataset that provides lesion-level correspondence between 3D PET/CT volumes and free-text radiological findings. It comprises 11,356 lesion descriptions paired with 3D segmentations. Second, we propose PETAR-4B, a 3D vision-language model designed for mask-aware, spatially grounded PET/CT reporting. PETAR-4B jointly encodes PET, CT, and 3D lesion segmentation masks, using a 3D focal prompt to capture fine-grained details of lesions that normally comprise less than 0.1% of the volume. Evaluations using automated metrics show PETAR-4B substantially outperforming all 2D and 3D baselines. A human study involving five physicians -- the first of its kind for automated PET reporting -- confirms the model's clinical utility and establishes correlations between automated metrics and expert judgment. This work provides a foundational dataset and a novel architecture, advancing 3D medical vision-language understanding in PET.